


Utopia

by Eustacia Vye (eustaciavye)



Category: Firefly
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-16
Updated: 2008-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:33:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eustaciavye/pseuds/Eustacia%20Vye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm wired all wrong, and I know everything I'm not supposed to. I'm a witch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Utopia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vivier](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Vivier), [alianora](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alianora/gifts).



_I forget who I am  
When I'm with you  
There's no reason  
There's no sense  
I'm not supposed to feel  
I forget who I am_  
"Utopia" by Goldfrapp

 

They made me broken.

I can pilot, and it calms me. I think in smaller chunks, process more coherently. Particle and gravitational physics become linear tranquility again. I stop feeling as though my internal organs prefer to meet Serenity's walls, that my gray matter will sploodge through my ears if I tilt my head the wrong way.

When I step off the bridge, when I can't feel the controls beneath my fingertips, it all starts to unravel and I lose the thread of things. It's as if there are no colors or shapes or sounds, as if I've fallen apart again and have to be stitched back together with monofilament wire and catgut suture. I discombobulate, ambulate, segregate and syncopate; my thoughts lose shape but it's a comforting kind of place to be. I've gotten better at blocking out the sound in my head so that my twisted thoughts are my own, and I'm not reading things before they happen. But my ground is gone, center askew and gravity wells pull me to pieces.

They thought to build a utopia, a stratified perfection where no one questions and the body politic will move with orchestrated efficiency. The monsters they built were to enforce the utopia and bring the common wilderness to a heel, but the monsters were flawed in their belief and need for perfection. The monsters drew the darkness out; instead of lancing the boil, they spread the infection. The monsters bred a new kind of evil, but it hardly matters now, does it?

I can think like a linear being while I'm on the bridge. It's when I leave that things fall apart. I know they made me broken, I know they rearranged pieces that didn't fit properly and pushed aside all they thought they didn't need. I know they thought they were justified, holy warriors on the operating table, the paladin seeking the undead.

They made me broken. That's how they made me; I'm a doll without a purpose.

I'm wired all wrong, and I know everything I'm not supposed to. I'm a witch.

Jayne sits next to me, hand running along my thigh and I can feel the tracings of runes upon my skin. They're signs of protection and absolution, wards against grief and ruin. He doesn't know it's too late, doesn't know I can't be fixed. He pretends that his touch can heal me, that he can rearrange me from the inside out, that his hand on mine will be all right. He seeks to center me, to ground me, to mold me again. I close my eyes and nod my head, kneeling beside him and float away to darkness. Takes me as I am, locks away the fears that lie deep inside. His nightmares are full of wicked silver blades and long dark hair. I know I'm as much a monster as the Reavers are, as much a killer as any of his dreams.

I lie on my stomach and let his hands wander over skin, tracking a map upon the backs of my thighs and curve of knee. He bends on one knee – mustn't explain the symbolism, mustn't ask for more than I deserve, mustn't need more than he can give – and touches his lips to the skin almost reverently. His tongue darts out, quick, snakelike – snake in the garden and I'm the Eve to be seduced and summoned – and tastes me. He savors, like a sweet wine, thinks _bao bei_ even if he can never say the words, and opens me to honey.

He says he likes my lost super brain, my Reading, the graceful flick of wrist as I turn him over to begin again. He says he likes it when my mouth is shut around him, arms around him, legs crossed over his back and my own arched like a bow string taut enough to send the arrow the full distance to the mark. Body without soul, without mind, without heart. He claims it's not true, I have these things like a real girl does, like something not an automaton made broken from the start, shape within the bones that look like girl, that thing that I can never be. He takes me in, takes me, shapes me, molds his hands upon my flesh like an artist with clay, molds me into something more than a girl.

Make me a real girl, Jayne. Make me something else. They made me broken to pieces, shuffling with tears to grind the gears within. Make me something real.

Please wait for me, wait for me, touch your tongue to the hidden recesses, flow like warm honey, suckle for the milk that cannot come, wait for the shards of soul to break to powder, wait for the stifled cries to rise amongst the scent that lines the sheets. Wait for me to flutter and pour from my bones like liquid sunrise, flowing over your muscle and sinew like the River they thought that I should be.

I touch the ridges of muscle, trace the valley between them, leading down the trail to where hips join thigh, skin parts and creases and rises to meet my lips. Lick and taste and discover how to make a moan transcend meaning and time, stretch the theory of relativity beyond its original boundaries, make a body sculpt itself to pleasure.

_I can teach you,_ his mind whispers in the dark, when touch is the only way to feel, the only way to learn, the only way to move. _I can learn you and I can teach you, and I can make you feel again._

And here we are again.

I sit in the pilot's chair on the bridge, mind stretched out to its limits, which extend beyond Serenity's metallic skin. I fold in on myself, knees to chest and chin to knees, nearly keening with want and need. _Need,_ the way the Reavers did, the mindless craving for more than they could have or should ever have to have. _Want,_ with a cold callous edge the way Alliance mastery could never fulfill in the pompous heads of state that paraded past my seat of infamy, my own iron maiden—

—here we sit and I know it's too good to last before the planet patrols come looking for us. The sun is bright and warmer than I remember and it's almost like a desert around us. He crinkles his blue eyes at me and I feel his hand close tight around mine.

"You thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?" he asks me, and I nod as my lips curl into a smile I didn't know I could make.

I take the weapons master in hand, behind the copse of Joshua trees arching toward the sky, warm and sticky and salty-sweet over my palm. I lick the remains and smile around my fingertips and see his eyes darken further, storming over the horizon. I bend over backwards and the lithe sinew twists beneath his hands. Palms sliding across the curve of skin, the hollow between beneath my flowing neck, hair across the dry dirt. Trace me, face me, make me, make me become again and again and again.

Alarums ring, caught up in the sickly sweet throes, and I shrug them off to flip a switch and become the necessary pilot staring off into space. We have to go, have to go, have to go on and on and on, the taste of him thick on my tongue and to the back of my throat. I can imagine that hours of memorization couldn't relay all the nuance in his form, no matter how brilliant I can still be in some ways. I curl around the warmth left in his arms, and here we go away again.

Bittersweet, like dark chocolate on the tongue, liquid butter smooth gliding down my throat. I can see the dark blue haze over his eyes, the need to get more than what's been given so far. I know what he wants; I want it, too. Reach down and feel the ground, the dark matter between atomic stars, the superstrings that form the 'verse. Feel the careworn hands and calluses against bare hipskin, tips curling into the hollows of my hips. The hunger coils inside of me, poised and ready to spring, ready to grow into a supernova. This is more real than any reality, any switch or flicker of communication between ships.

"I have a very good imagination," I tell him. I could draw a thousand interpretations of the way he makes me feel, compose villanelles and sonnets of sonnets to extol the wonders pressed into my skin, the lost runes of protection and lines to buried treasure.

Jayne laughs, looking up from the stomach he had paused to kiss. "Oh, yes, I know."

This is what perfection is. This is what the true promised land is. This is what is all that is good and right with the 'verse, all that it should aspire to. This is the real utopia, not what Alliance justicars thought they could enforce with bone and blood and steel. That would never be in the common good, not the way this is.

He dreams of silver – kill the wolves in the walls and the vampires on the hill – and of the dark hair swinging in blood-coated hanks. He dreams of a curve of skin, the curl of lip, and a dark smile gleaming in a dim bunk before it disappears between his thighs. He dreams of a girl that maybe cannot be and never will, that maybe is and is not at the same time, Shrodinger's cat revisited. I collapse the wave and become something that looks like a girl, lost in the waves that he provides, lost beneath the surface of nonlinear thought and crude dynamics.

I mount the stairs to the bridge platform, toes curling on the open grates of flooring. I see the stars skim by with rainbows in their afterimages, Doppler at work. I sit and think and stalk the hollows of their minds. Do they guess? Do they know? I can't imagine them caring, knowing, accepting with a gracious smile. Perhaps Inara; she knows the ways of emotion and flesh and need. The others would never look past the surface.

Do you see? Do you see beneath the still waters, the pebbles tumbling beneath the sand, the tiny crustaceans crawling for a piece of land to call their own? Do you see anything beneath the placid face I show you to placate the wispy guilty thoughts curling within your minds?

They don't, they never do. They're content with their illusions and dreams, as I am with mine. And so it goes, and so it ever is.

Jayne parts me in twain, lips on my skin, tongue curling with an untamed skill. Fingers crooked and pulling me to pieces, shards going nova, fluid fire in my veins, heat beneath my skin rising past the flash point of magnesium. _Bright lights,_ fever bright, eyes sliding into the back of my skull, thoughts dim and motionless for an eternal pause of breath.

I'm a witch, and I've cast my wicked spell upon you. Revel in my wanton glory, the scent on your tongue and fingers, the gleam in my eye a mirror to yours.

I'm marked, you're marked, and it's only a matter of time before the others learn to see.

I blow the stardust from across my palms and watch it lace its way across the ether to scatter across the planes and angles of Jayne's chest. He is Euclidian geometry, I am sine and cosine, though I can watch theta jut from the angles formed from the planes of his legs. Fever along my spine, singing his praises as every ridge is traced by calloused fingers and rasping tongue. His stubble itches, but I revel in sensation. I've been too long in the cold, too long locked in the box and frozen in place. We can begin again, I know. I see it in his dreams and feel it in the hitch of breath when I give him that smile he's helped me to learn. I see it in the dilation of pupils and the stray edge of thought that begins with _I shouldn't want this._

Maybe we shouldn't, but we do, don't we?

I resist the urge to curl my bare toes around him at dinner, resist the urge to mirror unspoken thoughts with deed and intonation. _Bao bei_ ghosts through me, a shiver and chill amongst the mindless chatter that ebbs and flows in time around me. I smile my little smile, tilt of the head, watching the pulse leap at the throat. I know the frame rate of its flow, I can feel the taste of it on my tongue. I can feel it throb against me, face pressed deeply in the crook of neck and shoulder, breathing in the essence of him.

_"Mei mei,_ are you with us?" Simon chastises. Foolish _ge ge,_ of course I am. I live in metaplanes and solid planes, angles and lines and curves. Linear space and geometrics to coast through gravitational lines within metallic skin.

"I live in my utopia," I reply, giggling as his brow furrows in thought. He thinks me backward and backsliding, he thinks I'm descending into psychotic space that he can't reach. Then I laugh outright and turn back to dinner, humming a tune he once sang to me as a little girl. The others believe I tease him, I taunt him as a _mei mei_ might, no more and no less, though the edge of madness remains a threat they tense for.

I cast my eyes at my utopian companion, though his remain on his plate. No guess for the others, no clues to guide their path. It's better this way.

I like it when I can slide my hand along bare shoulders, feeling the blade beneath. I like knowing that I'm the one to taste the salt on his skin, that Jayne allows no other to do this. I alone can feel his teeth from the inside of his mouth, I alone know what it's like to stroke him to finish. This is my gift, my absolution.

I'm not just a broken thing. I'm not put together wrong in these ways that matter, in the touch and slide of skin. I'm not the thing to be pitied or pat on the head then shoved aside when important occurrences begin to transpire. I'm not, I'm not. I'm the pilot, the psychic, the physic, the moon girl with molten skin that sheds for Jayne alone.

They made me broken, but I'm not just a broken thing. I'm waiting for the others to realize this.

 

The End.


End file.
